


take what i took and give it back to you

by fairytiger



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-09
Updated: 2020-06-09
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:15:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24627649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairytiger/pseuds/fairytiger
Summary: Ginny feels stupid and embarrassed, and fine, it’s not like she expected him to be thrilled about being cosmically bound to his best mate’s little sister, but "I think you’re nice" is somehow worse than every time he pretended not to notice her blush.So fine. She’s Harry Potter’s soulmate, but Harry Potter isn’t hers.According to Harry Potter, anyway.
Relationships: Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley
Comments: 22
Kudos: 201





	take what i took and give it back to you

The idea is new, even if the magic isn’t.

After the first war--after Time made it clear just how little there was to go around--there was a sudden, vested interest in no longer wasting it.

With one simple incantation, you could draw your soulmate to you, like a flower to the sun. 

It’s just one more thing to divide the wizarding world; do you wait as Time intended? Or is this precisely what magic is meant for?

Harry’s never been good at waiting.

x

Ginny is in the middle of dinner when she feels it.

An invisible rope tethered to her chest that pulls her up and out of her seat.

For a moment, for one horrible, terrifying second, she thinks it’s like last time. Except it can’t be, because she’s fully aware of what she’s doing, even if she’s not doing it herself. 

And it feels...good. It’s light instead of darkness, hope instead of fear.

“Where are you going?” asks Demelza.

Ginny doesn’t know, but this thing, whatever it is, she trusts it.

It’s slow at first, then she’s moving, faster and faster, legs and feet tripping over themselves as she races from the Great Hall, down the grounds, past the beech tree, to the lake—

The rope slackens. She stops short. 

There’s Harry, hand pressed against his chest, right over his heart.

She puts a hand to her own.

“Oh.”

x

It’s not who he expected.

But when had anything gone the way he expected the last four years.

“Oh,” Harry says.

If Ginny blushes, it’s impossible to tell in the fading light. He can just make out a flicker of surprise, but then it’s gone. 

“You summoned?” she says, cool as the evening air around them.

“I...I wanted to see what would happen.”

Ginny lifts her hands, a half-hearted _ta da._

“You don’t seem…” Harry begins.

“Surprised?” Ginny shrugs. “The bar was set a bit high after first year.”

If he wasn’t expecting Ginny Weasley, he certainly wasn’t expecting this version of her. Unflappable, looking at him like the biggest injustice of this revelation is that she’s missing dinner. 

“Look,” Harry starts, trying to regain some control of the situation, and a little of his pride. “I just wanted to say, to whoever it was—is—that it’s not true.”

Ginny raises an eyebrow, then pulls at the neck of her robes. The mark is just below her collarbone, bright white against pale skin, weaving around her freckles like ivy. 

“This begs to differ.”

“Yeah, I know,” he says, looking away. “I guess what I mean is, it _can’t_ be true. Not for me.”

“Are you…” Ginny laughs, a bit disbelieving. “Are you soul-breaking up with me?”

“I’m saying that no matter what this says,” he taps at his heart, where he can feel his own mark blooming against his skin. “I can’t be anyone’s soulmate.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because it’s dangerous. Having anyone linked to me like that...it isn’t fair to them.”

_Because I might not live long enough for it to mean anything._

“So,” Ginny draws out. “You’re doing me a favor?”

“I’m saying I think you’re nice--”

“Wow--”

“And I think you’d make a lovely soulmate. I just...can’t be yours.”

It sounds so woefully inadequate now that he’s said it out loud.

“And if, say, Cho Chang were standing here instead of me,” Ginny says. “You’d tell her the same thing?”

Harry’s cheeks burn.

“Of course I would.”

Ginny stares at him a moment, then shrugs.

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yeah. I get it. We’re square.”

Harry breathes a sigh of relief.

“Okay. Right, good.”

“I’m going to head back now,” she says, nodding in the direction of the castle.

“Okay.”

He sounds like a bloody parrot, but he’s too relieved to care. It went well, he tells himself as he watches her walk back, long red hair billowing behind her. 

x

Less surprising than being Harry’s soulmate is being told _no_ _thanks._

There’s a past version of herself, a much younger Ginny who, had she been told that one day Harry Potter would rebuff her in any capacity, would have died from the thrill that he’d noticed her enough to even do so.

But Ginny’s not so young anymore, and it all feels a little too familiar. A little too much like pouring secrets into a diary only to have them used against her. Thrown in her face as if to say, _what did you expect, little girl?_

It’s not a charitable comparison; there’s a lightning-bolt-shaped difference between being possessed by evil itself and being told that your soulmate’s destiny is meant for something bigger than love.

But Ginny’s not feeling charitable at the moment. 

She feels stupid and embarrassed, and fine, it’s not like she expected him to be thrilled about being cosmically bound to his best mate’s little sister, but _I think you’re nice_ is somehow worse than every time he pretended not to notice her blush.

So fine. She’s Harry Potter’s soulmate, but Harry Potter isn’t hers.

According to Harry Potter, anyway. 

She’s absently tracing the spot where the mark lays beneath her shirt when Michael Corner smiles at her from across the Hogsmeade platform. 

He’s hinted plenty, and sort of asked, but never outright.

Ginny strides purposefully toward him.

There’s something to be said, lately, for outright.

x

It comes up somehow over dinner at Grimmauld Place.

Harry can’t remember who started it; maybe it’s Fred waxing poetic about Angelina or Sirius explaining the tattoo wrapped around his wrist, but suddenly they’re on the subject of marks. Light ones, dark ones, and the difference between them. 

“Where do you think You-Know-Who got the idea from, hmm?” Mrs. Weasley says bitterly. “Wouldn’t be the first time he’s twisted something good for his own foul purposes, would it?”

“Surely you don’t agree with using the incantation, though, do you Mrs. Weasley?” asks Hermione.

“Well no,” says Mrs. Weasley. “I think it’s best to wait. There’s no need to rush these things.”

“What happens if your soulmate dies before you’ve met them?” Ron asks. Hermione hits him on the arm.

“What?” he continues. “It’s a fair question. Are you just out of luck forever? Settle for second best your whole life?” 

“No one knows precisely,” says Sirius. “The ones who wait carry on as usual, I suppose, because they don’t know any differently. But the ones who _do_ know, the ones who’ve done the magic...well.” His eyes go dark. “They must be able to feel it, too.”

Harry can’t help it. He glances at Ginny, but her eyes are fixed on her plate.

“All the more reason to wait,” Mrs. Weasley says, a note of finality in her voice. 

x

Ginny can’t sleep.

It’s partly the house, the sadness that seeps through the walls even with all the good being done within them. 

But it’s words keeping her up tonight, the ones from dinner, the look on Harry’s face as they were spoken.

_What happens when your soulmate dies?_

_The ones who know, the ones who’ve done the magic…_

She goes downstairs to get a glass of water, just for something to do. Rarely has she ventured into the depths of the house alone, even less in the middle of the night, so it takes everything in her not to scream when she bumps into something halfway down the stairs.

“Sorry,” Harry hisses. “Me. Just me.”

“Water,” Ginny says by way of explanation.

Harry lifts his own glass.

“Have mine. Least I can do.”

“All right,” she says, taking the glass and a seat on the steps. 

Harry sits beside her, his elbow brushing hers as he props his arms on his legs. Neither of them say anything. The house is still quiet and sad, but a little less so with another solid presence.

“I’m sorry,” Harry says after a while.

“For what? Scaring the pants off me?”

“I didn’t give you a choice. I didn’t...think.”

It’s then that Ginny realizes that he thinks she’s angry. Perhaps she ought to be. He’s right, after all; she knows, and most days, she wishes she didn’t. 

“I thought about doing it,” Ginny says. “The incantation.”

Harry whips his head to look at her.

“You did? When?”

“The summer after first year. After...everything. I was just so lonely, all the time, even in a house full of people. And the thought of being able to call on the one person in the world that was better for me than anyone else...it was scary, how tempted I was.” She gives him a wry smile. “Turns out he wouldn’t have had to travel far.”

Harry looks away, sheepish.

“You didn’t do it, though.”

“I didn’t.”

“How come?”

Ginny rolls the glass between her hands.

“Because Mum and Dad didn’t. Because they always said they would have found each other anyway.”

Harry scrubs at his hair.

“Yeah.”

He looks at her now, green eyes pleading for forgiveness, and Ginny’s mark warms like a newly lit fire. The feelings she’s long since talked herself out of are suddenly, tantalizingly close. If she wanted to, she could reach for them as easily as his hand.

“How are things with Michael?” he asks abruptly.

The fire goes out.

“Good. New.” Ginny shrugs. “We’ll see.”

Neither of them say what Ginny is sure they’re both thinking.

Which is that there’s nothing to see, really, when you’re already sitting next to your soulmate.

x

The thing Harry doesn’t tell Ron and Hermione about kissing Cho—the thing he _can’t_ tell them—is how his mark burned when it happened.

Not like his scar burns, no prickling or white hot pain. It burned like ice, like it knew that it was wrong, that it wasn’t who it was supposed to be.

Harry watches Michael take Ginny’s hand as they leave a DA meeting, and wonders if she feels it too.

x

Maybe Harry actually did do her a favor.

Ginny finds unexpected freedom in knowing that her flings might be just that, but being determined to enjoy the hell out of them anyway.

It frees her up to go out for Quidditch and join the DA and not spend every single second wondering what Harry might think. 

Because she already knows what Harry thinks.

Embarrassment was just a stop on the way to understanding, and with enough distance from that night, Ginny can almost forget about it. She can be like any of the other girls walking around without a mark, kissing and flirting and not throwing around words like _soulmate_ and _forever_.

Until she catches sight of the mark, of course. Until it burns cold as Michael’s hand snakes up her shirt, and then it’s not so easy to forget.

Ginny pushes his hand away.

“Why not?” Michael grouses.

“I don’t owe you a reason,” she shoots back.

It’s one of the many reasons she breaks up with him.

x

It’s different that summer, Harry can’t explain why.

Maybe it’s what they went through at the Ministry, though it’s not like it’s the first time they’ve been through hell and back together.

But it is the first time Ginny seeks him out, pulling him from the dark places he’d find himself following Sirius’ death. Sometimes it’s an extra biscuit from the kitchen, sometimes an offer of two-on-two Quidditch, her broom propped on one shoulder. She doesn’t couch it in condolences or pitying looks either; she looks right at him, straight _through_ him, and Harry wonders if her ability to do that is because of the mark, or if that’s just who she is now. If that’s who she’s always been. 

If that’s why the mark sits on her chest and no one else’s. 

“Who else is playing?” Harry asks, tearing his eyes away from the spot in question.

“Ron. And Hermione, if we can’t find anyone else, Merlin help us.”

She offers a hand to help him up, and Harry squeezes it to say all the things he can’t.

_I don’t deserve your kindness_ and _you’re the first person to make me laugh since it happened_ and _thank you._

“Guess we can’t team up if we want it to be a fair fight,” he says as they head past the garden to the makeshift pitch.

“Ah, come on,” Ginny says, just barely nudging his shoulder. “Where’s the fun in that?”

They play until the sun goes down, until an owl swoops overhead to drop a letter into Ginny’s outstretched hand. Another from Dean, his fifth in as many days, not that Harry’s counting.

Ginny jogs ahead of the rest of them to read it, and Harry can’t tell where the sunset ends and her hair begins.

x

Dean says “I love you” over the first Hogsmeade weekend.

Ginny burns her tongue on her tea, coughing and sputtering loud enough to draw the attention of every other couple in Madam Puddifoot’s.

“Ginny,” Dean says, running a hand over her back as she catches her breath. “Did you hear me?”

“I did,” Ginny nods, running her tongue over her teeth. It’s going to smart for days. “Wow.”

“Wow?”

He’s hurt and confused, but trying to be stoic about it. Kind, understanding Dean.

“A bit soon, yeah?” Ginny offers. “I just wasn’t--”

“‘S’alright,” Dean says. His smile is sad and a little embarrassed. _I think you’re nice_ echoes in Ginny’s head before she bats it away. 

She kisses him so she doesn’t have to say anything else, and suddenly she’s angry, positively livid with Harry. It courses through her like fire, what he did, taking away her say in the matter. Because if she didn’t know better, if there wasn’t tangible proof lurking just beneath her jumper, she might think Dean was something that could last. 

The knowing no longer feels like a freedom. It’s a chokehold, strangling any other chance at happiness before it even begins, and she hates Harry for that, she really does. 

Hates him so much that she’s pulling at Dean’s neck, urging him closer, throwing one leg over his in their corner booth-- 

“Easy,” Dean laughs, pulling away. “We can--”

“Go back,” Ginny nods. “Yes. Now.”

When Dean asks about the mark later, as Ginny’s shirt hits the floor of the empty classroom, she tells him it’s a birthmark.

x

_It’s Ginny_.

Her name has become a mantra lately, a point and counterpoint for every argument Harry’s had with himself over the last few months. 

Ginny, who’s Ron's sister, which practically makes her family.

Ginny, who’s afraid of nothing, when she has every reason to be afraid of everything.

Ginny, who makes flying look like breathing; natural and effortless, and all the more amazing now that Harry knows the work she put in to make it look that way.

Ginny, who has a mark above her heart that matches his own. A mark that sometimes, when Harry can no longer look at her for wanting, he holds a hand to, wishing it were her. 

_Ginny. Ginny. Ginny_.

x

Ginny feels it coming long before it happens.

It’s subtle at first. The way they hang back together after practice to pack up equipment and go over plays. They volley strategies back and forth, laughing all the way back to the castle. 

He’s looking at her more, too. More than usual, more than ever, at meals and in the Common Room. They’re the last ones up most nights, each claiming homework and reading that they never seem to do once everyone else has left. And when they finally part ways, Harry looks at her like he wants to say so much more than _goodnight_.

When it finally does happen, it’s like that night two years ago, but instead of being pulled, she’s running of her own volition. _To_ him, not _at_ him, and when she jumps, she knows he’s going to catch her.

Knows for certain he’s going to kiss her.

Knows down to her bones that it’ll ruin her forever when he does.

She doesn’t care. 

Forever was decided a long time ago. 

x

“Do we absolutely need this?” Ginny says, pinching the silvery fabric of the cloak between her fingers.

“What?” Harry pants. They’ve been at this for an hour, maybe longer. Harry tends to lose track of time, place, all rational thought when they’re together like this, tangled up in each other. Exploring, teaching, learning; when the only sounds in the world are each other’s names, and _there_ and _yes._

“It’s roasting under here.” Ginny readjusts herself on his lap, making him eye-level with her thin vest, damp with sweat, her mark just visible above the lace trim. 

He presses his lips to it, lets them linger. 

Her arms come to circle around his back, his neck, holding him there. When he goes at it with a little more vigor, she half-sighs, half-laughs.

“You’ve already left a mark, don’t add another.”

“Sorry,” he murmurs, pulling back to look at her, dazed and happy.

They dispense with the cloak and soak in the breeze rolling off the lake. Ginny doesn’t go far, laying back against his chest, and when her head rests against his mark, it warms on the spot.

They haven’t talked about it since they got together. They’ve talked about everything else, and done a fair share of not-talking, but never about the marks. They feel weightier now, pressing in on a future that might not exist.

Harry’s so tired of all the _might not_ s.

“I can hear you thinking,” Ginny says, lacing their fingers together.

“What am I thinking?”

“You’re wondering how you lived without me all this time.”

“I haven’t lived without you,” he grins. “I’ve lived _with_ you, literally, for going on four summers now.”

She lets out a little _hmm_ , staring at their joined hands.

“What is it?” Harry asks, kissing her exposed shoulder. He can feel her thinking too, knows the look on her face even if he can’t see it.

“Sometimes I wonder if this--what we’re doing--”

“What?”

She turns her head just enough to look at him.

“Is it because you want to or because it’s already been decided?”

He’s confused for only a moment, and then he understands. 

“It doesn’t make a difference,” she says quickly. “Not really. I just—“

Harry moves to face her.

“It’s not because of the mark. Ginny,” he ducks his head to catch her eye. “It’s not. I tried to soul-break up with you, remember?”

“Hard to forget,” she laughs. “You were absolute shit at it.”

“I was young and foolish. I’m much wiser now, in case you haven’t noticed.”

“So you think this would have happened? Mark or no mark?”

He gives her the consideration he should have given her last time.

“I think...I would have found you anyway.”

It’s not easy to render Ginny speechless, but in that moment, it’s nearly as gratifying as making her come apart. 

Back under the heat of the cloak, Harry does both.

x

Ginny sees it coming long before he does it.

She sees it in the bags under his eyes, the way that, in the days following Dumbledore’s death, they barely talk. There’s too much to say, and none of it is enough. So they just sit beneath the beech tree, Harry’s head in her lap as she strokes his hair.

It’s the longest she’s ever held still. But if holding him means holding them together a little longer, she’ll do it.

They’ve already had weeks longer than she expected. 

When it finally happens, there’s a weird, maniacal urge in Ginny to laugh. Because even after everything, two years later, he’s still breaking up with her. 

He’s a little better at it, at least, saying all the things she’s always known but never wanted to reckon with.

How they were always on borrowed time, how a mark isn’t the same as a guarantee. 

How she knows, and still she’s waiting. 

x

Most days, it’s all Ginny can do to put one foot in front of the other. 

She has to remind herself to breathe, to eat, to go to class and pretend like she gives a damn.

Pretend like it’s not killing her to be the only Weasley at Hogwarts when there should be two.

The questions are relentless, at first. Everyone wants to know where Harry is and what he’s doing, and she just wants to scream at them _so do I!_

Neville and Luna form a protective shield around her, and the questions stop, even if the whispers don’t.

They still have DA meetings, which, without Harry, have become more strategic than practical, but no less vital. They’re always recruiting, rallying, never letting anyone forget what it is they’re fighting for. 

As if Ginny could forget.

When they steal the sword, Ginny tears her shirt on the blade in an attempt to smuggle it out of Snape’s sight. And even though they ultimately fail, there’s a swell of pride in Ginny so strong, she wonders if somehow Harry knows, if he can feel it, too.

“That’s a pretty one,” Luna observes during their “detention”. Hagrid has them searching for unicorn hairs among the undergrowth, and Ginny stops walking to follow Luna’s gaze to the spot where her shirt is torn. Her mark gleams in the lamplight, and Ginny pulls at her collar to cover it.

“Birthmark,” she mutters.

“I don’t think so,” Luna says mildly. “Harry couldn’t have said the incantation as a baby, no matter how advanced he was.”

Ginny stares at her.

“How did you know?”

Luna smiles.

“The glow, of course. It’s not as bright now that he’s gone, but you can still see it.”

It’s the most comforting thing Ginny’s heard in weeks.

“Is it just me?” Ginny asks, unable to look at Luna when she does. “Or does--did he--”

“He glowed, too,” Luna confirms. “It was quite distracting in DA meetings, actually.”

“We weren’t together then.”

“You’re not together now,” Luna says, picking up a strand of unicorn hair from the ground, examining it carefully. “But the glow doesn’t seem to know that.”

x

Harry’s last thought before the blast of green light hits is of Ginny.

Her hair, her laugh, and how he hopes that whatever happens to her mark next, it doesn’t hurt.

x

There’s so much work to be done. 

Wounds to mend and hearts to heal, so many in number that some days Ginny can’t bear to face it. 

But she does, because she owes it to the ones who faced the worst of it and didn’t live to see the good side win. Lupin, Tonks, Fred. 

_Fred._

The work starts over the summer. Slowly, gently; no one’s in much of a hurry to find a new normal. Sometimes they sit down to meals, sometimes they don’t. Dishes pile up and there are shoes and clothes everywhere, but her mother doesn’t seem to notice. Ginny suspects she’s holding off sorting them all because she knows she’ll find things of his, and that kind of pain can wait until tomorrow, or the day after. Days stretch out in front of them now, full of promise and possibility and grief, surely. But they’re there for the taking, when the moment is right, when each person is ready.

Some are more ready than others.

Ron is the first to leave. He’s going to Australia with Hermione, no arguments, even though their mother tries to make him stay. But there’s no stopping him, and he doesn’t need a mark to explain why.

Harry stays.

His things are in Ron’s room, but it’s Ginny’s he goes to at night. They hold each other like they did before he left, but instead of bracing for war, they’re healing from it. They map with their hands the new marks forged over their time apart; the lashings from the Carrows, the burn of the locket. Amid it all, their matching ones remain untouched, miraculously unmarred. 

The same can’t be said for what’s on the inside. 

“I don’t deserve it,” he tells her in the dark.

“What?”

“Any of it. This place, your mother looking at me like I’m a saint or--I don’t even know what, but I don’t deserve it, Ginny, I don’t--”

“Stop,” she says gently, propping up to look at him. “You can’t do this to yourself.”

“Do what?”

“Make shouldering the blame your new destiny.”

He swallows, his eyelashes suddenly wet. 

“I don’t know how to--”

“None of us do. We just...start small. Little by little, we’ll get there.”

Little by little, they do. 

Little by little, the scars fade, though never gone completely. Little by little, the good days outnumber the bad ones. The first time George replaces Percy’s teacup at dinner with a nose-biting one--”Gotta make up for lost time, brother”--Ginny feels like she finally has permission to laugh again.

Summer dwindles, people scatter. Ron and Hermione return hand-in-hand, with Hermione’s school trunk and enough textbooks for two.

“Told her being a war hero would get her out of seventh year,” Ron says. “But she won’t listen.”

Neither will Ginny. She didn’t nearly die her first year not to see it through to the end. Harry, for his part, doesn’t argue. He’s right there with her at King’s Cross on September 1st to see her off, kissing her like they’re the only ones around.

“See you soon,” he says, tracing her mark with one finger. Their secret, the only one left between them. “First Hogsmeade weekend.”

“Or sooner. I know how to summon you, after all.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“No, but it’d serve you right.” She pulls at his jacket, kissing him again, and wonders briefly if Luna is around. 

If the glow is every bit as bright as it feels.

x

Ginny laughs when he asks her.

“Who else am I going to marry? My non-soulmate?”

Harry knew she’d give him hell, had expected nothing less. They’ve already talked about it in a thousand “when”s instead of “if”s, in plans and compromises, in a tiny flat they’ll outgrow the moment Ginny realizes she’s pregnant.

But that’s a while from now.

Now, Harry’s asking. He didn’t give her a choice before, but she has one now.

“Is that a ‘yes’?” he asks, grinning up at her. 

They would have found each other anyway, but whatever happens next is entirely up to her.

Ginny smiles, and nods.

**Author's Note:**

> shouts to auraispurple, who i'd summon in a heartbeat if i could


End file.
